BANGOR TOWNSHIP, MI -- For most students at Bangor Township John Glenn High School, hearing Holocaust survivor Martin Lowenberg speak was moving and enlightening.

For Johanna Koechling, though, it was personal.

A 15-year-old foreign exchange student from Germany, Koechling said a member of her family hid a Jewish citizen during the Holocaust. When Lowenberg finished speaking, she made her way to the front of the auditorium to introduce herself.

"He was talking about part of the history of my country, and I think it's part of my responsibility to learn as much as I can about it," she said in a German accent. "We start learning about it in elementary school ... right now, I would have a whole year about Hitler and the Holocaust at home, where we would focus just on that."

Lowenberg, a stout-figured man with graying hair and a black-and-gray yarmulke, spoke and posed for photos with student after student on Monday, March 9, following his speech about his life in Germany. A survivor of Nazi Germany and a Southfield, Michigan resident, he regularly speaks about his experiences.

"(It's) to let people know what misery can do to you, and how you can adjust yourself to a better life and better life for others," he said.

Martin Lowenberg, Holocaust survivor, talks with Johanna Koechling, an exchange student from Germany, after a presentation Monday, March 9, at John Glenn High School in Bangor Township.

Koechling, who is from Marsberg, roughly 75 miles from the Germany-Netherlands border, said hearing Lowenberg speak is much different than reading about her country's history in a book.

"In elementary school, they don't tell us the horrible things, but we start learning about everything that was happening -- that there were concentration camps, and that Hitler started the second World War," she said. "When you talk to someone who really lived through it, it's way different than learning it from textbooks."

Koechling said she thinks it would be difficult to live with the kind of memories Lowenberg must carry.

"It's really hard to recall all those experiences all the time," she said. "I'm not sure I would like to have it in my mind all the time, and listen to questions that make me get all emotional."

Lowenberg's audience was made up mostly of students in Dale Clyde's U.S. History and Holocaust courses at John Glenn High School.

"It doesn't happen often enough, and it's getting harder and harder to happen every year," Clyde said, noting the increasing difficulty of connecting young students with Holocaust survivors. He could tell his students were interested, he said, from the rapt silence that filled the school's auditorium for nearly two and a half hours while Lowenberg spoke.

Hitler's rise to power

Lowenberg was born in 1928 and grew up in Schenklegsfeld, near the center of modern-day Germany. The fifth of seven children, his life was interrupted as Hitler's power grew in the early 1930s.

When he was 8, he said he was falsely accused by a teacher for sticking his tongue out at a picture of Hitler -- something he said he would never have dared to do.

"He had me beaten up by other boys much older than I was," Lowenberg said. "He brought a board to school with thumbtacks and nails, and he put it on a chair and he had me sit on top of it."

Following the incident, Lowenberg's parents transferred him in a parochial school in Bad Nauheim, more than 100 miles away. As living in Germany became less and less possible for Jews, he moved time and time again, later with the members of his family that hadn't left Germany, he said.

"The people went so against us," Lowenberg explained. "Many of them liked Hitler. They thought he was the savior of Germany, because Germany came right out of a depression, which Hitler blamed on the Jews."

Two years later, Lowenberg moved to be with his parents in an apartment in the city of Fulda after they were barred from owning their home. It was there he experienced Kristallnacht -- the "Night of Broken Glass" -- that saw anti-Jewish pogroms throughout the country on the night of Nov. 9, 1938.

"While I was in school the day before, stones and rocks came flying through the windows, and three of my fellow classmates were hurt very badly from the shards of glass and so forth, so the teacher dismissed the school," Lowenberg said. "And we had to run home, and we already saw the synagogue in flames. People during the day were dragging jewish people through the streets and beating them up. As a matter of fact, this went on all over Germany."

The next day, he said, all the men between ages 16 and 60 were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, his father and teacher among them. Though both were eventually released, it marked the end of his formal schooling in Germany.

Lowenberg lived with his parents, older sister Eva and his younger twin brothers Kurt and Fritz in Fulda until 1941, when they were deported to a Jewish ghetto in Latvia. In 1943, Hitler's government began to break up his family; first, his sister Eva was sent to perform slave labor in July, and he was sent to nearby Kaiserwald in August, he said.

"The ghetto was liquidated in November of 1943," Lowenberg said of his mother, father and two younger brothers. "Everybody that was still there was taken to Auschwitz and never heard of again."

Lowenberg's labor at Kaiserwald was hard -- he said he shoveled snow, cut down trees and hauled logs, loading and unloading ships in the harbor of the nearby Latvian city of Riga, where the ghetto had been. By the end of 1944, though, Russian troops began to push Germany back toward the center of Europe, and he was transferred to Hamburg, from which he was forced to march for four days and nights to the city of Kiel.

From there, he was liberated. He weighed 76 pounds, he said.

Lowenberg was reunited with his sister Eva, he said, and moved to New York after the war. He worked hard, and by the 1960s he was the vice president of Continental Textile Corp., which led him to Southfield, Michigan. He retired in the 1980s, and now spends much of his time traveling and speaking about his experiences.

"It was freedom," he said of arriving in the United States. "It was a wonderful country -- it is a wonderful country, and we're all fortunate to be here."

The most valuable lesson

John Glenn High School Principal Tony Bacigalupo said he and fellow school staff members were "blown away" by Lowenberg's presentation on Monday.

"What was really powerful to me was his message of anti-hate, and what it gets down to is understanding differences from one another," he said. I really feel like, based on the students' questions, they made a connection with him."

Many students agreed.

Logan Reder talks about listening to Holocaust survivor Martin Lowenberg Monday, March 9, at John Glenn High School in Bangor Township.

Junior Logan Reder, who takes both of Clyde's courses, said he's always been interested in World War II and Holocaust history.

"It was kind of eye opening and enlightening to see how bad people can be treated," Reder said. "I thought of one of the quotes from the movie 'Fury:' 'It's amazing how one man can do that to another man.' "

Holly English, another one of Clyde's U.S. history students, agreed.

"It's one thing to hear your teacher talk about it," she said. "It's an entirely different thing to hear it from a survivor."